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November 1 - November 1, 2022
The fundamentalist come-on or practice of “witnessing for Christ” is literally an assault of shame.
Although evangelicals and fundamentalists specifically opposed the social gospel, missionaries often provided welfare and health services as good deeds or to make friends with the locals. Thousands of schools, orphanages, and hospitals were established by evangelical missions throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and while these humanitarian efforts saved lives and improved conditions for millions of individuals, they brought forced and coerced conversion to Christianity. This “carrot and stick” strategy left a toxic residue of racism, authoritarianism, the oppression of women and
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Gerard Colby and Charlotte Dennett document through their in-depth research the purported relationship between Nelson Rockefeller, missionaries in South America, and the modern genocide of Amazonian Indians. (Thy Will Be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil.) “The authors describe the links between the SIL's (Summer Institute of Linguistics) in-depth knowledge of indigenous people and their languages and the creation of a sophisticated communications and intelligence-gathering network serving the business interests of multinational corporations
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It was not God being brought to tribal cultures, but an alien culture of possessive individualism grown to such a giant corporate scale, with its own rapacious, competitive needs, that it could only devour them.”
“You are destined for eternal punishment in hell as a result of your sinful condition. If you accept Jesus as your personal savior, you will be spared eternal damnation and will spend eternity in heaven. We are offering you eternal salvation. If you accept it, you will be blessed on every level. If you reject it, your life will not go well, and eternal torment awaits you after death.” The overt message is: “We are here to save you and improve your life.” The covert message is: “If you refuse to be saved, you will be destroyed.”
In fact, what is communicated in attempts to convert the “lost soul” is a subtle terrorism embellished with intimidation to which any self-respecting human can only respond with curiosity about what gives the proselytizer the authority to issue the ultimatum. The evangelical argues that the Bible gives him or her the authority.
The issue then becomes an issue of authority, and authority is the crux of Christofascism.
Fundamentalist Christianity is inherently authoritarian and demands that humans adhere to an external authority—religious scripture, the state, parents, teachers, political leaders, laws and law enforcement. It negates the inner authority of the human heart and the human mind because those cannot be controlled by a force outside oneself.
Curiously, it appears that the more thoroughly we explore fundamentalist Christianity and the evangelical perspective, the more obvious are the links to American domestic terrorism.
No other contemporary Western nation shares this religious intensity and its concomitant proclamation that Americans are God's chosen people and nation. George W. Bush has averred this belief on many occasions.
The counter-cultural revolution of the 1960s, the loss of the Vietnam War by the United States, the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, and the two-term election of a black President have unequivocally caused the cultural changes of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, so formidable for fundamentalists in those days, to pale by comparison. Not only must they convert the world as quickly as possible, but they must utilize government and every institution available to that end. Moreover, they must accomplish their mission by any means necessary. What then could be more
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Millions of largely white Americans, hermetically sealed within the ideology of the Christian Right, yearn to destroy the Satanic forces they blame for the debacle of their lives, the broken homes, domestic and sexual abuse, struggling single parent households, lack of opportunities, crippling debt, poverty, evictions, bankruptcies, loss of sustainable incomes and the decay of their communities. Satanic forces, they believe, control the financial systems, the media, public education and the three branches of government. They believed this long before Donald Trump, who astutely tapped into this
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Subsequently, Sharlet, a professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College, became the executive producer for a five-part Netflix documentary on The Family in 2019, which everyone who seeks to explore the “fundamentalist jihad” must watch.
The idea that God ordains a person’s place in the world is not unique to Vereide or his successor, and it has pernicious side effects. If God picks our leaders, the thinking goes, we should obey them—no matter how violent their personal lives or how vicious their political views. If you worship power, the pursuit of it becomes a sacrament.
For believers who subscribe to this account, Cyrus is a perfect historical antecedent to explain Trump’s presidency: a nonbeliever who nevertheless served as a vessel for divine interest.
The authoritarian, fundamentalist nature of certain evangelical strands is a prominent theme in the places where you see the most ardent Trump supporters or the QAnon believers, because they’ve been told: “You don’t need to study [scripture]. We’re giving you the answer.”
Fundamentalist Christians have a very schizophrenic relationship with Jews. On the one hand, they proclaim that Jews are “God’s chosen people” while at the same time asserting that unless a Jew becomes a born-again Christian, they will spend eternity in hell.
Whether in the bloody crusades of the Middle Ages or in the sweat-drenched Sunday rants of a megachurch evangelist, people of color must be colonized; women must be subdued; non-heterosexuals must be eliminated; nature must be conquered; white males must prevail. Chris Hedges said it best: “Either convert, or you are exterminated.”
I believe that the very notion of original sin is traumatizing, and in many cases, intentionally so. It is a form of spiritual abuse inflicted on believers and non-believers alike out of emotional insecurity and a compulsion to shame, dominate, control, and manipulate the unconverted into a born-again experience and the converted into submission to specific theological or doctrinal perspectives and behaviors.
“I'd be adrift in an ocean of uncertainty." Yes, and perhaps that's the only honest place to be. Another name for uncertainty is humility. No one ever blew up a mosque, church, or abortion clinic after yelling, "I could be wrong.” —Frank Schaeffer,
In many fundamentalist churches, little compassion for the poor, homeless, and disabled exists. Sometimes these churches teach that people are poor because they aren’t born again or they aren’t tithing or they are lazy. Disability may be considered a punishment for rejecting Jesus. The assumption is that if one is white, born again, and following Jesus and the church to the letter, these “trials and tribulations” will not befall them.
As mentioned above, since the election of Donald Trump in 2016, more people than I recall have personally asked me how it is that evangelical Christians could not only vote for him, but continue to support him throughout his Presidency, then vote for him again in 2020. I continue to answer with three simple realities: Fear of people of color, fear of legal abortion, and fear of marriage equality. In fact, this is what evangelical Christianity in America has become—a fear-fueled crusade of racism, sexism, and homophobia that has absolutely nothing to do with the teachings of Jesus in the New
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Radical right-wing pastor Greg Locke in 2020 declared that "…there is no reason the church of the living God and the kingdom of Jesus Christ should not rule this nation. Those that truly follow Jesus Christ [should] take it by force!"
The QAnon movement has suffered multiple failed prophecies, predictions about events that never came to pass. To continue holding onto beliefs in spite of those disappointments, followers need something many evangelicals have in spades: faith.
In fact, being persecuted is a badge of honor in this worldview because one can follow in the footsteps of Jesus, the apostles, and a host of early-Church martyrs and feel uniquely special in a particularly toxic manner.
Author, speaker, and theological scholar Benjamin Corey writes that “the most interesting biblical hermeneutic [interpretation] is the one that sees Paul’s statements on women as permanent injunctions for all time, but sees Jesus’ command to love enemies as being so strangely full of nuance that it never seems to apply.”
Riggleman said there are parallels between the radicalization process that is being driven by QAnon in the evangelical community and the Islamic radicalism that the US has been trying to combat since 2001: “There certainly is radical Islam, but there’s now radicalism on certain evangelical sides, and I think people have been afraid to call it for what it is.”
